Thinkers Timeline

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who lived through one of the most turbulent periods in British history — the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the Interregnum. He spent years in exile in France and worked as a tutor to the future King Charles II. His most famous work, Leviathan (1651), is one of the foundational texts of Western political philosophy. In it he argued that without government, human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and that people therefore have a rational self-interest in submitting to the authority of a sovereign state. He is considered one of the founders of modern political science and social contract theory.

John Locke was an English philosopher. He is one of the most influential political thinkers in world history. He was born on 29 August 1632 in a small village in Somerset, in the south-west of England. His father was a country lawyer who had fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War. Young John grew up during that war, watching England struggle over who should rule. He was a brilliant student. He went to Westminster School in London and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He stayed at Oxford as a teacher for many years. He studied medicine and science as well as philosophy. He worked with the famous scientist Robert Boyle. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society, Britain's most important scientific group. His medical training later saved the life of his friend and patron, Lord Ashley, by performing an operation to remove a cyst from his liver. Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) became a powerful politician. Locke worked as his secretary, adviser, and family doctor. This brought Locke deep into English politics. When Shaftesbury fell out with King Charles II in the early 1680s, Locke too was in danger. He fled to the Netherlands in 1683. He stayed there for six years, writing the books that would make him famous. In 1688, King James II was overthrown in what English people called the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary took the throne. Locke returned home safely. In 1689 and 1690, he published three of the most important books of his age: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Each changed its field. He never married. He spent his last years at a country house in Essex, writing and corresponding with scholars across Europe. He died on 28 October 1704, aged 72.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and studied at the University of Glasgow and then at Oxford. He became a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he taught ethics, politics, and economics. He is best known for two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which is about how human beings understand right and wrong through imagining how others feel, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which examined how economies work and what makes countries rich or poor. He lived during a time of enormous economic change: the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain and the rapid growth of international trade. He was trying to understand these changes and work out what principles should guide economic life. He has often been called the father of modern economics, though his ideas are more complex than they are often presented to be.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and legal reformer. He was the founder of modern utilitarianism. He was born on 15 February 1748 in London, into a wealthy lawyer's family. He was a child prodigy. He started learning Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at twelve. He qualified as a lawyer but never practised law. He thought the English legal system was a mess of confused rules that harmed the people it was meant to serve. He spent the rest of his life trying to reform it. He inherited enough money to live without working. For nearly 60 years, he wrote almost every day. He produced thousands of pages on law, government, punishment, economics, and ethics. Much of his work was not published during his lifetime. He would start a book, follow his thoughts into new topics, and leave the book unfinished. His friends and disciples, including James Mill and later James's son John Stuart Mill, edited and published large parts of his work. Bentham's main book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared in 1789. It set out his core principle: the measure of a good action or a good law is whether it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This principle, called the 'principle of utility', became the foundation of utilitarianism. His influence on law and politics in Britain was enormous. He helped design prisons, wrote model constitutions for foreign governments, and shaped the reform movements of the early 19th century. He had unusual ideas. He designed a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, that has since become a famous image of surveillance. He argued against laws punishing homosexual acts, centuries before this became widely accepted. He left instructions for his body to be preserved after death and displayed in a wooden cabinet. His preserved body, called the 'auto-icon', is still on display at University College London, which he helped inspire. He died on 6 June 1832 in London, aged 84.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English fossil collector and self-taught palaeontologist whose discoveries on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset transformed scientific understanding of the deep past. She was born into a poor Dissenting Protestant family that made part of its living by selling curiosities — fossils and shells — to summer visitors on the south coast of England. Her father Richard taught her and her brother Joseph how to find fossils in the crumbling cliffs of the Blue Lias. He died when she was eleven, leaving the family in debt. Mary took up fossil hunting as a trade to support her mother and brother. At about twelve, she and Joseph uncovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton known to science, a marine reptile that had been unknown before. Over the following decades Mary made many further extraordinary finds on her own: the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur outside the usual fossil record, important ichthyosaurs, and fossil fish with preserved ink sacs. She learned enough anatomy, geology, and classical languages to read the scientific papers written about her finds — and to correct them. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens and published descriptions of them sometimes credited her by name and sometimes did not. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven, still poor despite the scientific importance of what she had found.